I posted earlier this week about the introduction of SPEC's CPU2006 benchmark to our CPU test suite, and today, I'd like to talk a bit about two other entries: Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 and HandBrake 0.9.5. In the past, we used both TMPGEnc Xpress and ProShow Gold as our video creation / encoding benchmarks, but for a couple of different reasons, neither are ideal any longer.

With this CPU test suite upgrade, we wanted to make sure that we were catering to as many people as possible; enthusiasts, end-users, professionals and so forth. We also wanted to make sure that the tests we chose made sense in the real-world - that's to say that we don't want to use a benchmark that is just a benchmark and nothing more. There has to be a purpose behind it.